There has been know an image forming system including a distribution server which distributes image data, and an image forming apparatus which communicates with the distribution server to download the image data from the distribution server and performs printing based on the downloaded image data.
For example, in an image forming system, image data stored in a server is downloaded to a printer to perform printing. In this image forming system, the server stores a print job which is registered in advance by a user. After authenticating a user, the printer obtains a job list of the user from the server. Then, when a print job is selected from the job list, the printer downloads the selected print job from the server and performs printing.
However, the above-described image forming system has the following problems. That is, in the image forming system which downloads the image data stored in the server to the image forming apparatus to print the image data, the image data stored in the server is downloaded regardless of a state of the image forming apparatus and print settings which are input to the image forming apparatus. In this configuration, however, there occurs a case where image data having a size which is larger than image data required for printing is downloaded, which would cause a problem of using an unnecessary area of memory of the image forming apparatus, and/or a problem of increasing an unnecessary load on a network.